In the late-1970s, Joel Hodgson left behind his roots as a child magician and ventriloquist and started doing stand-up comedy in Minnesota. He’d comb thriftstores for props. His favorite was the Church of St. Vincent de Paul store in Minneapolis.

Then with a touch of pareidolia — that state of seeing faces in inanimate objects — Hodgson had an idea. On his mind was a documentary he’d seen about the creation of the spaceships of “Star Wars,” as well as some facelike sculpture by Louise Nevelson and Pablo Picasso.

“In the basement of St. Vincent de Paul, you could go through with a shopping cart and fill it up with stuff like Tupperware and organizers that silverware goes in,” he says. “There were a million tackle boxes. All this plastic stuff, and I grabbed it all, thinking I could make a robot out of it. I took it home, where I had a hot-glue gun, and glued it together. Shot a coat of paint on it. And I thought, ‘I kind of like this thing.’”

Two dollars of plastic junk and a few cents of glue turned into a puppet business for Hodgson, who sold his plastic robots at a props store in Minneapolis for $50 a piece. Those robot puppets would become part of a TV show he was developing in which Hodgson and other comedy writers would crack wise at lousy movies, a commodity as bountiful as thriftstore plastic.

Related Stories

The result, “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” was a maddeningly simple concept: A janitor (originally Hodgson) was trapped in space, where he was forced to watch B-movies with his robot companions. The captive viewers proceeded to mercilessly ridicule the films’ scripts, props, plots, actors and any other piece of low-budget flotsam that occurred on screen.

“I backwards-engineered the whole thing,” Hodgson says. “If you had three white guys sitting in a theater, that’s just stupid. But if you have one guy and two robots in a theater, that’s a unique shape. So I pulled an all-nighter before we shot the pilot.”

That pilot had Hodgson and his robots cracking wise at the 1968 sci-fi film “The Green Slime.”

The format was sufficiently simple to be something people do for free all the time: watching bad films with friends with a running comedic commentary. The genius of “MST3K,” as it’s often shortened, was taking a Saturday-night activity, adding a couple of robots, upping the quality of the jokes and then broadcasting the film and commentary to a modest legion of fans who devoured it.

“It’s funny to hear you describe the show that way because it’s kind of like icebergs in the ocean,” Hodgson says. “No matter how much iceberg has melted, there’s a percentage above the water that we see and discuss. I don’t think much about all that’s beneath. So when you bring up what’s underneath, I never looked at it that elegantly. My goal was to make the most inexpensive comedy show possible. That’s really it. I knew how a green screen worked. I knew about working in silhouette. I knew how to build a doorway sequence and how to make puppets. And the idea of ironic viewing, as you point out, I didn’t invent that. It was in the world. In college, they’d show bad movies, and I thought the films were adorable. So why wasn’t somebody making a bigger show out of these things?

Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live

When: 7 p.m. Saturday

Where: Cullen Performance Hall, University of Houston, 4800 Calhoun

Details: $39.50-$49.50; 832-842-3131, mst3k.com/tour

Read More

“So I tried to design an efficient comedy-delivery system.”

“MST3K” premiered in Minnesota in 1988 and was picked up by Comedy Central (then it was the Comedy Channel), where it ran until 1996. The Sci Fi Channel (now SyFy) picked it up for three more years. The show went away in 1999.

But “MST3K” was a perfect program for living beyond its airing. Its format was unmoored from time and place — not just because it was set in space but because bad movies have a sort of ageless appeal as prompts for humor. As Hodgson points out, “We didn’t set out to create a narrative. It wasn’t like a normal show where you had to watch the episodes in order.”

The primitivism of the set and the puppets only further removes “MST3K” from its era. It views today much as it did then. That said, the 200 or so episodes that originally aired still left the fan base hungry. Last year a crowd-funded spate of new episodes was released by Netflix. Six more new episodes will arrive on Netflix this month.

Hodgson, 58, and his puppets, actual age unknown, are on a “MST3K” tour that hits Saturday at the Cullen Performance Hall, where the gang will view “The Brain,” a film from 1988, marking the 30th anniversary of “MST3K.”

Hodgson insists that I overthink the “MST3K” approach to selecting and ridiculing the films. “The Brain,” to my eyes, was a Scientology allegory. He says, “It’s so Canadian, I can’t help but think of Marshall McLuhan when I watch it. Though I don’t know if it has anything to do with him either. That’s just my association.”

Hodgson appreciates the varied responses: Fan favorites aren’t always the episodes he thinks show the best humor. “Part of my interest are specific types of movies that attract me, specifically,” he says.

I comment that one of the show’s great gifts is knowing when to comment and when to let the bad movies do the comedic lifting. The use of silence in an “MST3K” episode is often damning in and of itself.

“It hasn’t changed much since we were first making the show,” he says. “We didn’t know if we were making the best or the worst show; we were just doing what we do. We really let the audience decide what’s funny about the movie, and we do our thing. I wish I was that stylish to think, ‘Let this one breathe, fellows.’ If I wanted to lie to you, I could tell you that’s what we do. But really it’s just a natural process of leaving the movie alone and then commenting when the time seems right.”

Andrew Dansby covers music and other entertainment, both local and national, for the Houston Chronicle, 29-95.com and chron.com. He previously assisted the editor for George R.R. Martin, author of "Game of Thrones" and later worked on three "major" motion pictures you've never seen. That short spell in the film business nudged him into writing, first as a freelancer and later with Rolling Stone. He came to the Chronicle in 2004 as an entertainment editor and has since moved to writing full time.